Welcome back to another episode of the three-man leave college basketball podcast.

I'm your host this week, Jim Root, joined by Kai McEwen and Matthew Cox, my two cohorts.

We are here to talk coaching higher grades.

I was not aware, Mr. McEwen, I'll go to you first, of how popular this episode was.

People are very excited that this was coming.

I was excited to see that excitement.

It was a whole excitement snowball, a little cycle. But yeah, we go through all 50 hires. We're going to talk about a letter grade for everyone. And of course, Kyle, I like that you included in the tweet about the episode. We're going to make sure Matt sticks to the grading curve of... I didn't. A baseline is a C. I didn't. You have to give some A's, B's, D's Fs. All right, Kai. We'll go to you first. I can defend himself. I was very close. I will say, I was very close. I was very close, but I could not fit into the neat normal curve. So what I did, Matthew, is I graded them and then I curved them to our parameters.

So it's a curve grade.

Sure.

Mine's a curve grade too.

It's just slightly skewed to the good because I want to bang the gavel and make a point that I think the ADs are doing a better and better job each and every year.

But yes, I mostly curved it just not in the precise parameters in which I was given. I don't like following

instructions. It's not my thing. I don't like that. It's not. I hate it. We should. I will

gather all of our answers, Jim, and we'll tweet them because we're content beings. It's going to cause fodder and ire. Great. Wonderful.

Okay, perfect. So that's going to happen. Yeah, I think Matt's point about AD's doing better.

I think I disagree because every year there's firings. So I don't know that like you could say,

wow, they're all just hitting home runs. Like there's going to be guys that fail in every,

every year of the class. And the fun is trying to predict that. That's what we're aiming at here,

or at least sort of that's the concept. But that is the theme of the show. It's a three-man-weef College Basketball podcast. We're talking coaching higher grades in the 2026 off season. We'll start with a very, very quick routes roundup. There's really only like one or two bits of news I want to discuss. We'll hit the coaching higher grades and we'll have reviews at the very end of the pod.

So stick around for that.

First, a shout out to J. Pity, aka Joe Paskov for our opening tunes.

I've played poker with Joe Paskoff twice.

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